


Take the Prize

by nanrea



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, F/F, Space Pirates AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-16
Updated: 2015-01-16
Packaged: 2018-03-07 21:00:18
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,093
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3182996
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nanrea/pseuds/nanrea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Vriska contacts Terezi with a proposition: a mark that is very unusual, almost unlikely, and possibly holding the treasure of a lifetime. How can Terezi refuse?</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take the Prize

**Author's Note:**

  * For [placentalmammal](https://archiveofourown.org/users/placentalmammal/gifts).



The greeting was familiar and unexpected, this deep into enemy territory. “Heeeeeeeey,” Vriska’s sharp edged voice echos through the bridge. “Hailing the good ship Pyralshit! You there, Terezi?”

“Why if it isn’t the captain of the Mind Hag,” you reply. You take a deep sniff at the screen where Serket’s face is inset against a display of her vessel, a sporty little number whose sleek shell reeks of human aesthetics but bristles all over with Alternian modifications: the sort of ship that screams pirate all over.

Much like yours does, in all honesty. Though you have the paperwork that makes her legal under Alternian law. Some Alternian law.

“Listen, Pyrope. I got a proposition for you alright? I got information on a small Imperial convoy and thought you might want in on the action.” She leans back, crosses her arms and smirks that irritating smirk.

“An Imperial convoy? A small Imperial convoy?” It does not seem likely that there could be such a thing in the territory Vriska usually hunts. Imperial ships travel alone, as they are built so large a single cruiser often packs enough firepower and berths enough much smaller fighter ships that it is effectively a fleet packed into a ship the size of a small planetoid. Convoys are a human thing, or a Rebel thing. The separatists, united under the Heiress, in allying with the humans, has adopted many of their practices, including making many different sized ships to fit according to what role they can play in battle. Needing to preserve as many lives as possible, the Heiress has had to be willing to experiment with new tactics. The Empire, locked in millennia of stifling tradition and with sole access to the homeworld and the children who are born there, has not. You lean back in your chair. “I find that highly unlikely.”

Vriska snorks and tosses her hair. “I kneeeeeeeew you wouldn’t believe me. Here, I’ll send you the image.”

“A visual image? Damn, that’s so old school,” Dave, Terezi’s human liaison, muttered from behind her as the image came up on screen. The delicious candy red of Imperial vessels fills the screen, and delighted, you stand and approach the screen, give them a lingering swipe with your tongue. Five distinct ships, of unusual configuration for what the color screams. Old, you think. Very old.

“Are you licking the screen? Seriously, Terezi?” Vriska says, as you lean in to sniff at them again, searching for more details.

“Of course! Why become captain of my own ship if I can’t lick whatever part of it I like?” You step back, stand up straight and cross your arms behind your back with military precision. “I shall consider your proposition and contact you within one hour with my answer. Terezi out.” As you turn, the screen returns to a neutral display of the surrounding environment, cutting off Vriska’s protest midsentence.

“Thoughts?” you ask your bridge crew, sweeping them a glance, your human implanted cybernetic eyes taking in their expressions.

“I smell a trap,” Dave says without hesitation.

“Dave!” Jade, your chief engineer, smacks him on the back of the head for that pun as a grin splits your face. You can never tell what quadrant the two humans are aiming for, but their perversity is highly entertaining to witness.

“The appearance of a convoy comprised entirely of extremely outdated Imperial military vessels is pretty weird,” Aradia’s voice comes from over the intercom. Your pilot, you remember, was something of a history buff before she became a helmsman.

“Hmm. Nepeta. Do you think we can take them, alone or if we cooperate with Vriska?” you ask. 

Your battle strategist and weapons specialist tilts her head, her eyes taking in the details of the strange convoy on her personal screen, historical data provided by Aradia scrolling alongside the images which also pointed out modifications and possible updates to artillery and shielding. “Mmmm, Purrezi is right to suspect a trap. The ships would be no purroblem if they are alone, but there could easily be an Imperial cruiser hidden off screen.”

“We can easily run fast enough if there’s actually a cruiser there,” Aradia says. 

You nod, pick up your sword cane and lean on it. “I can’t imagine what the Empire would choose to move in such an unusual manner. This is either a trap, or a clever way of getting anyone to think it’s a trap so that they can transport something without harassment.” You chew on your lip, thinking about it. “Or possibly refugees wishing to escape the Empire and using salvaged ships to do it, in which case as agents of the Heiress, we are obligated to offer aid.” You nod, standing upright again. “We’ll do it. Contact the spiderbitch.”

There is a nod from Rose, and the screen changes back to a view of the Mindfang as you turn. “Very well, Vriska,” you say, planting your sword cane in front of you with both hands. “I’ll help you take down this convoy.”

“Allllllll riiiiiiiight,” Vriska crows, high fiving a human hand from off screen. “I’ll send the coordinates for their extrapolated location and meet you there in three days!” She cuts communication.

“Not eight?” you mutter to yourself, amused. Maybe this bizarre moirailship with John is doing her some good after all.

\--

With a crash and a bang, you initiate the battle. The convoy had been found three night cycles ago, coasting along slowly through a small system which hosted a potentially habitable world. You and Vriska had watched, hiding your ships behind human cloaking technology as the convoy slowed, spent a cycle scanning the potential world, and then apparently rejected it for whatever criteria they were using. No battle cruiser appeared in your scans, discreetly tailing the mysterious convoy, as you held your positions, allowing the convoy to leave the station.

“Very mysterious,” you had commented to Vriska over a secured channel. “Why are they scanning planets? If they are part of the Empire, they should have access to the Imperial Future Conquest Planetary Registry.”

“So maybe they’re working to up8 the Registry, or something, I don’t know. All I know is there’s no cruiser anywhere that would cause us a problem, Terezi. I’m setting the time of attack,” Vriska had answered, cutting out before you could suggest waiting to see what the convoy was doing, or perhaps attempting to contact them to see what they were about.

You’d shrugged. It had taken you nearly three weeks to find the convoy to begin with, as it had been travelling much slower than you had expected, probably due to this stopping and scanning business. You were in no mood to offer any sort of parlay to those irritating fools piloting the convoy anyways.

The battle is pathetically short. Even two against five, a privateer boasting the latest in human and Separatist technology and a pirate with similar outfitting, with surprise third party armature as well as you spot several small fighters of Tirellian make come bursting from the Mindfang’s hold to take on the meager defenses put forth by the convoy’s only carrier. With quick efficiency your Pyralspite takes down the lead ship, disabling its guns and propulsion with precisely calculated hits, Nepeta and Jade working your railguns in tandem. 

Out of the corner of your eye you see one of Vriska’s Tirellian fighters explode in a delicious redgold plume of vented atmosphere when it darts between your ship and the convoy’s main battleship. “Getting sloppy,” Vriska’s voice hisses through your mind as you bring the Pyralspite about, quickly overloading the battleship’s shields and disabling it. There are still two ships active, you note, attempting to run now that they’ve lost three of their ships. You easily burst the atmosphere of the bridge to one and the Mindfang clips the other along the bottom where the helmsmen are housed, disabling its propulsion.

“I’m still three to your two,” you sneer at Vriska as her face comes onscreen. She growls back, sending a shiver down your spine. “Later,” you promise her and yourself.

“Hot,” Dave mutters behind you, followed by the sound of Jade smacking him on the back of the head. 

\--

The first vessel you board is a disappointing bust. The trolls aboard are all dead, blood draining from ears and noses from the burst atmosphere. There is no treasure. You’ll leave determining what to salvage to Vriska, since Nepeta and Jade quickly determine that there is nothing here worth taking aboard the Pyralspite. 

“All outdated junk,” Jade says from within a maintenance shaft. 

Vriska’s head engineer, Equius, simply shrugs, his darkly shadowed eyes taking in the wear on the equipment. 

The second and third ships yield much the same, though Jade says she might be able to repurpose some of the scanning tech on the second, and Nepeta is able to scrounge some replacement parts for your weapons systems on the third.

It’s the fourth that turns your world upside down.

On the largest vessel, the battleship that had nearly punched a hole in your Pyralspite, the atmosphere had vented out of the bridge and from around the weapons decks, but the crew decks were still somehow intact. Floating outside the enemy ship, Jade and Equius work in tandem to put in seals around a section of the hull that would access those decks, since you didn’t want to accidentally kill anyone before you got some information out of them. They stretch an umbiliculus between the airlock of the Pyralspite and the breach in the hull, and when they give the go ahead, you open your airlock.

With trepidation you watch as they punch through, equalizing atmospheric pressure. You wait a moment, watching for any retaliation from within the hulking vessel, and when none comes you take a cautious step forward.

From behind you Vriska gives an irritated growl and shoves past you, striding up to the edge of the artificial gravity field of your ship and launching herself into the freefall of the umbilliculus. She floats across the gap gracefully, and lands nimbly on the entrance to the other ship. You growl and launch yourself after, landing with a stumble and an irritating snicker from Vriska. You glair and growl when her cyborg arm grabs you by the back of your collar to keep you from falling onto your face. She presses you up against the wall with her body, a sharp grin stretching her face as she looks down on you, but any (welcome, but so unwelcome) dalience is cut short by Nepeta’s arrival. She waves out the clear material of the umbilliculus to Equius, then turns and giggles. Dave, landing next to her, snorts in irritation.

“Hot as this is, you two want to pack it in for a bit,” he says as he draws his sword and scans down one side of the side hall you’ve found yourself in, Nepeta equipping her claws and searching down the other with another laugh.

“I don’t scent anyone nearby,” Nepeta says, managing somehow to blend in to the grey of the hallway despite her bright blue hat and tail, “but Akwete Purrmusk is right, you purrobably want to wait a bit.”

“I mean, don’t get me wrong, your weird hatesnogging is totally hot and all but we’ve got a ship to secure here,” Dave mutters, his droning continuing along that vein as you shove away from Vriska and follow Nepeta along the hall, clearing the opening for John, Rose, and Vriska’s lieutenant to enter and draw their respective weapons, all for melee, of course, since you don’t want to punch any more holes in this ship than you already have.

You agree to split and search the halls separately, Vriska taking her crew one way and you leading yours in the other. Nepeta and you sniff around, her hunting for fresh scents and you to take in an impression of the place. The place is suspiciously empty, and you follow the hallway, checking empty rooms as Nepeta leads you deep into the bowels of the ship.

Vriska’s voice crackles over your communicator, sounding irritated about how empty the place is as well. You’re about to wonder out loud at what kind of convoy wouldn’t have any valuable cargo in it at all when Nepeta rears up short and signals.

She doubles back and says, “They’re all in the mess hall. I scented maybe five trolls, but something else, too.”

“Something else?” You frown. “What else do you smell?”

“I don’t know.” Nepeta growls and paws at the ground with her foot. “It smells familiar, somehow, and it’s definitely alive, but I don’t know what it is.” Her eyes grow large and sad. “It makes me think of Kanaya somehow.”

You feel your body go stiff. Kanaya. One of those memories you thought you’d left behind with your dreams of becoming a legislacerator, with your childhood. With Karkat. With Alternia.

“We’ll need to plan this carefully,” you say, and contact Vriska.

\--

Of course, with Vriska on your side all your plans go to shit. She bursts down the corridor and through the mess hall doors at the first mention of Kanaya, and is immediately thrown back through them with a surprising force. You charge after her, skidding to a halt next to her crumpled form as you stare, aghast, through the shattered doors at the massive, hulking form in the center of the mess hall. You know what that is. You’d seen it, or something like it, the few times you’d visited Kanaya in her desert. It’s only the humans’ quick intervention between you and the chainsaw of a protective jadeblood’s wild swinging that keeps you from losing your head as even Nepeta loses her battle instincts in the face of what’s in that mess hall.

“What the fuck is that?” Dave says as he and John work in tandem to keep the enraged Jadeblood’s chainsaw out of action. Rose has managed to subdue a terrified looking wiggler simply by looking at him, and is now engaged in subduing a teal blood with familiar horns and tears streaming down her face, her needles parrying the teal’s sword with surprising efficiency.

You tear your senses away from the Mother to look at Dave, try to regain yourself, stumble to your feet, ready your weapon, but instead you fall to your knees again as you take in the appearance of the jade whose chainsaw has just been shattered by a swing of John’s hammer. 

She’s not Kanaya. You know that. She’s too tall to be Kanaya, too old, too alive. But she looks just like her. Beside you Vriska stirs.

Before John can swing his hammer again and knock the Jadeblood out, his swing is caught by a glowing hand, and you feel your jaw drop. With a screech, the new fighter swings her other fist into John’s face, sending him flying out of the fight.

“Kanaya?” you hear, and then, “John?” With a shriek, Vriska flings herself forward, colliding with the impossibly glowing daywalker. Nepeta, beside the door, finally shakes herself out of her wonderment and bounds into the fight with a happy growl, landing on the back of the other jadeblood and clinging like the purrbeast she so often pretends to be as the jadeblood cries out and spins around, trying to dislodge her. Dave takes the opportunity to aid Rose in her fight against the crying tealblood.

Five, you think. Nepeta said five. You sweep the room, avoiding looking at the glowing revenant as you search out the fifth troll. Just in time, you look up.

From the vents a snarling greenblood almost drops on your head, one arm sweeping up the terrified and now crying wiggler, the other arm holding a wicked looking knife. She snarls at you, daring you to attack, but your eyes are locked on the color of the kid’s tears. The mutant kid.

“Hold up, STOP,” you shout as you rip your eyes away to see the Mother Grub, in her distress, begin to flap her wings. Probably not a good sign, though honestly you wouldn’t know. “Dave, Rose, fall back! Nepeta!” You keep your eyes locked on the Greenblood as you shout, “Truce! I demand truce and a chance to parlay, as a representative of the Heiress Feferi!”

That causes the greenblood in front of you to lower her knife a bit. Dave and Rose only pause briefly in their fight against the teal, though, which is probably wise, you realize, seeing the signs of blood rage in her eyes even through the red tinge of her glasses. Nepeta pulls back on the horns of the jadeblood she is riding, and whispers something in her ear which causes her to slowly stop spinning and trying to dislodge her.

Vriska has her opponent pinned already, though, and is just staring down at her. 

From the floor, John groans. At least he’s still alive.

“Truce,” you repeat, lowering your sword cane.

“Very well,” the jadeblood says, stumbling a little as Nepeta jumps off her back. “Speak well, though, for you have attacked us unprovoked, and killed many of our people.”

“You fly the colors of the Empire,” you reply unapologetically. “And you have travelled well beyond its borders. I, as a duly certified privateer in the service of Feferi, Heiress to the Empire which she has been denied, have a right to attack any of the Empire’s colors who travels beyond its borders. Do you contest this?”

She glares, then spits on the floor. “Pirates,” she says. “You’re nothing but dirty pirates.”

“Damn right,” Vriska says, a dangerous tone of false cheer sliding into her voice as she climbs off the glowing figure beneath her. “And you are kidnapping, hiding, sniffling, rainbow drinking LIARS, Kanaya Maryam! How could you let us think you were dead? For TEN SWEEPS!” she ends on a shriek, jumping to her feet.

“I do apologize, Vriska,” the woman says as she sits up. “Though in point of fact, as a rainbow drinker I am still dead. I am simply. Undead.”

“This is impossible,” you whisper. Nepeta whoops and leaps on Kanaya, hugging her.

“Kanaya, attend to the Mother, please,” the Jadeblood says. “Meulin, please do your best to subdue Latula without injuring her.” She sighs, then turns to you. “I wish to bargain for passage, then, to your Heiress. I believe we have something to offer her.”

Your eyes track Kanaya and Nepeta as they go to the Mother grub. “Yes, I believe you do,” you say.

**Author's Note:**

> Hopefully there's enough exposition that the basics of this universe come across without being so much that it's boring. In short: Terezi is a privateer, basically a pirate who works under contract to go after targets that hail from a specific nation, whereas Vriska is a traditional pirate who preys on vessels of opportunity. I hope you don't mind that their relationship is mostly only hinted at, but yeah they are kismeses. I made Terezi a privateer because she decided to follow Feferi in rebelling against the Empire, which made a career as a legislacerator impossible.


End file.
